1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to chemical additive management systems. Such structures of this type, generally, allow a manufacturer to determine if a chemical additive to be used will contain a chemical component or reaction product that is of toxicological concern to the end-user, and if it does contain such a component, what action to take.
2. Description of the Related Art
Product safety is of critical importance to manufacturers. While all products entail some degree of risk, a manufacturer is strives to minimize the risk associated with their product. For example, the shroud on the bench saw that automatically covers the blade when the user is not sawing. This is an example of a physical device to make the product safe. One can also describe numerous examples of electrical devices that make a device safer such as double insulation or the use of ground fault interrupters.
As for minimizing the risk associated with chemicals and their use, one has to protect against immediate hazards (i.e., chemical burns, etc.) and/or long term hazards such as exposure to toxic compounds, etc. Minimizing the risks associated with an immediate hazard can be relatively straightforward. For example, one can use the lowest concentration of the hazardous chemical required to perform the intended function such as using the minimum amount of caustic in an oven cleaner.
However, it is more difficult to minimize the risks associated with long term exposure to chemical hazards. In this instance, one has to have knowledge of the chemical of concern, its concentration in the product, the toxicity of the chemical, do calculations to model the exposure a customer receives from use of the product and finally act upon this knowledge. While this can be done for products containing simple component mixes, complex component mixes can quickly become unwieldy.
Because of this difficulty, many companies have been reluctant to do a comprehensive study to investigate all the chemicals from a customer safety perspective. Instead, they focus on a few chemicals of particular toxicological interest and do not vigorously pursue the other chemicals. Thus, it is readily apparent there exists a need to develop a system whereby one can readily identify if an additive possesses a chemical component or reaction product that may pose a toxicological risk.
It is also known in U.S. Pat. No. 5,330,621 ('621) to P. Visuri et. al, entitled "Continuous Elemental Analysis of Process Flows", to employ a system which describes the chemical method for performing continuous elemental analysis on various process streams. While not designated for this purpose, the system may be modified to perform elemental analysis on heavy metals, which is a small subset of the chemicals of toxicological concern. Typically, the number of heavy metals of concern is approximately 17 while the number of chemicals of toxicological concern is greater than 500.
While the program embodied in the '621 reference can analyze for heavy metals, it does not inform the user if the heavy metal concentration is of concern, from which products the metals are originating and what to do with these elemental metals. Consequently, a more advantageous system, then, would be presented if the system could avoid and/or minimize expensive chemical testing of samples and still be able to perform the desired analysis.
It is apparent from the above that there exists a need in the art for an additive management system that will allow the user to determine when a chemical additive to be used will contain a chemical component or reaction product that is of toxicological concern, but which at the same time avoids and/or minimizes expensive chemical testing of samples while still being able to perform the desired analysis.
It is a purpose of this invention to fulfill this and other needs in the art in a manner more apparent to the skilled artisan once given the following disclosure.